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Teaching in a school like mine, you get insulted a lot. Not by the students, who are (mostly) wonderful, but by conservative critics who judge and misjudge the performance of schools and districts that serve low-income, minority, and immigrant communities because they fail to look at our performance in context.

American Enterprise Institute Education Policy Studies Director Frederick Hess’ new column Should Schools Be Rewarded for Absenteeism? provides the latest example. In it he describes his impromptu debate with an unnamed school district superintendent who believes educational funding would be more equitable were it based on school enrollment, rather than Average Daily Attendance. Hess believes the superintendent is making spurious excuses for the attendance woes of so-called “failing schools.”

Why would funding based on enrollment be more equitable? Because students of low socioeconomic status face many extra challenges, challenges that reduce attendance rates. When students are absent, their schools and districts lose funding for them, however, their costs remain almost the same, regardless of daily attendance. 

Most states have adopted an enrollment-based or partially enrollment-based system, but America's two largest states, California and Texas, are among a half dozen that still apportion school funding by ADA. In recent years, legislators in both states have tried unsuccessfully to change this.

The Los Angeles Unified School District, where 76% of our students live in poverty, has been supportive of these legislative efforts. Kelly Gonez, a member of the LAUSD School Board, explains, “We lose about $200 million annually because of the difference between enrollment and average daily attendance.” 

Critics often prefer to ignore these schools’ extra challenges. Hess says funding based on school enrollment “rewards schools which aren’t doing their job,” and links the idea to supporters’ alleged “soft bigotry of low expectations.” Teacher union critic Lance Izumi asserts that under the proposed funding system, “poor-performing districts would have no incentive to address their deficiencies and poor performance.” Jon Coupal, president of the Howard Jarvis Taxpayers Association, lectures that “schools should reward success, not failure.”

To be fair to Hess, Izumi, Coupal, and other advocates of attendance-based funding, it isn't unreasonable to believe that linking school funding to attendance leads to higher attendance, and that uncoupling attendance from funding leads to lower attendance. However, research does not indicate that such a connection exists.

Education policy analysts Carrie Hahnel and Christina Baumgardner, authors of the 2022 report , explain that “research on how state funding policies can drive attendance is scant and mixed.” 

One study of school districts in Texas they cite found “very little variation in districts’ impacts on student attendance, after taking into account student background characteristics,” contradicting the notion that attendance-based funding has a positive impact on attendance. When Hahnel and Baumgardner compared attendance in states with attendance-based funding with those without it, they found that “no clear pattern emerges.”

What is clear is that socioeconomic disadvantages are linked with attendance problems. Hahnel and Baumgardner cite research indicating that “Students from lower income backgrounds are more likely to be absent since they face individual, family-related, and community-specific barriers that increase the likelihood of missing school…these students more often experience adverse health conditions, transportation-related barriers, school transfers, and housing insecurity.” 

Noting that Black and Latino students experience higher absenteeism than do White or Asian students, Hahnel and Baumgardner explain that research demonstrates that “a community’s crime rate and immigration enforcement activity also affects absenteeism. These effects are more pronounced at the high school level and in urban communities.”

Hess argues that moving away from an attendance-based funding system is like “throwing up your hands and telling me no one ought to be held responsible.” The student body at the high school where I’ve taught for the past 10 years has one of the lowest socioeconomic levels in the entire US, and also has significant attendance problems--exactly the type of school that Hess and other critics believe would be unjustly rewarded by this funding shift. Should my colleagues and I be “held responsible?" Are our alleged failings a tangible cause of our attendance problems? 

I see no evidence that they are. In fact, at times the administrators, counselors, and teachers at my school raise heaven and earth to try to improve our attendance. Our school has struggled for years to build closer bonds with a school community where the majority of parents speak little English and never graduated high school in their native countries, much less in the US. Most work low-wage jobs on which they must not only support their families here but often send money to their family members in their native land. The margin in their lives is practically non-existent. 

LAUSD also tries, with its , well-publicized , and more. The district obsessively presses schools to promptly report accurate attendance every day, with no exceptions. This pressure propels our administrators to interrupt us each day during 6th period class with an announcement that "X number of teachers still haven't submitted their attendance" for the period. It’s a daily annoyance for teachers and students, but we understand it. 

Why are students absent? I would not dream of asserting that all our absences are tied to students’ socioeconomic disadvantages, but the link is quite visible. 

With parents working and childcare often unaffordable, if grandma gets sick, a girl might be asked to stay home that week to take care of her toddler siblings. If the family has an economic crisis, a boy might be asked to cut lawns or do construction work with his father. If a family member has to go to court or weave his or her way through the healthcare system to get the medical care they need, sometimes the student goes with them to serve as a translator. 

Many high school seniors work weeknights. Some families are so economically embattled that just having an able-bodied 17-year-old at school all day every day instead of working or contributing to the family is a luxury they struggle to afford. 

One of my best students spent much of her high school years living in a church basement after her family was evicted from their apartment. Another talented student’s family lost their place to live and spent over a year living in a garage.  

Sometimes students are gone for a week or two at a time. Latino comedian George Lopez says that for Mexican immigrants, “You never went on vacation, you went to Mexico when someone was dying. They wake you up in the middle of the night: 'My mom’s dying, get in the car.’” These long absences set the student back, and it's frustrating, but what can we teachers do?

Enrollment-based funding is certainly not going to solve all of the problems faced by the schools and districts that serve low-income students, but it would help. And the discussion of attendance (as well as test scores, graduation rates, or practically anything else) would be more productive if our critics took a break from moralizing and instead looked at the challenges that students and educators in these schools face.